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Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton had the most unlikely results at the Emilia Romagna GP on Sunday after the seven-time champion finished 13th in the race. Mercedes driver made a good start at the Imola GP after qualifying P14 in the sprint race and overtook the cars soon enough to gain three places. The Briton was battling for P10 to earn at least one point for his team, but a slight delay by the crew during the pit stop and an unsafe incident with Alpine's Esteban Ocon in the pitlane dropped the Mercedes driver back to P14.
After the disappointing results of the Emilia Romagna GP, Hamilton told, "A weekend to forget, that's for sure." Speaking on his possibility of winning the 2022 F1 championship, the 37-year-old said, "I'm out of it, for sure. There's no question about that, but I'll still keep working as hard as I can to try and somehow pull it back together."
However, before the race, Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff had stated that the Brackley-based team were not out of the 2022 championship yet.
Hamilton has now slipped to seventh in the driver's standings with that disappointing result and is now 58 points behind leader Leclerc. After the race, Mercedes boss Toto Wolff spoke to Hamilton on team radio to say "sorry" for an "undrivable" car which suffers from violent bouncing issues and a lack of speed, though George Russell managed fourth. Expanding on his comments, Wolff said, "We are not good enough for a world champion, not worthy for a world champion. We need to fix the car."
Adding further, Toto said that Lewis deserves better from us, and "as a team, we need to provide him with a machine that can fight for the front positions." The Mercedes boss hailed the driver by saying that he was the best in the world and he just did not have the machine and the equipment underneath him to execute.
Commenting on Hamilton's performance, Red Bull team advisor Marko suggested that the Mercedes driver should have retired after last year. Marko told SSN, Craig Slater. "Maybe he is thinking he should have stopped last year!"